Still Going Strong

  We are on day 9 of our adventure in patience, learning, and time management. We are happily going strong, and doing much better on the time frame. We were done on time today if we are judging by what her school schedule was before. That is such a relief. I feel less stressed about clock watching. Kelsey seems to be very happy to be at home. I have asked her several times about how she likes home-school versus her old school. She says every time without fail that she likes home-school better. She says she likes making her own things. I'm not sure that she didn't make stuff at school before, but maybe they are more dialed in to her interests now, and are more frequent. Kelsey has an unusual amount of patience for a 6 year old, or anyone for that matter, especially considering her mother is a completely neurotic lunatic. The thing I love most about Kelsey is her good heart. She has patience for all of this and has not really complained once, and has shown kindness to me when I have been short with her. I am thankful for her, as well as the rest of my family.

Well, enough with the sentiment! I am no namby-pamby! On with the update!

More money fun! She is learning about money, and has been most impressed with how you can clean pennies with pencil erasers, before I redirected to our lesson. Maybe I'll have to do a science lesson with ways to clean pennies, like coke, vinegar, ect. Let us hope that is not the only thing she takes away from learning about money.

Speaking of science experiments...... This is the one we did today. She has been learning all about habitats. Today was a spork's natural habitat among cutlery. Apparently it lives in a cake pan. Ha! No, really, she was learning about the desert. Her experiment today was a dry sponge cut to look like a cactus, and observing and recording the change when water was added. Thus the before and after pictures. It was to help show how a cactus stores up water in it's arms and "body" in order to have enough when it is especially dry. Both the girls really liked this experiment. Who knew a sponge was the best toy ever. Now to send her into the bathroom with it! "Here kids, watch what it does when you put soft scrub on it and rub real hard on those water spots! It's like magic!" Actually the magic eraser is an amazing phenomena that is inexplicable. That is some sort of sorcery there, Mr. Clean! Or should I call you Sorcerer Clean?!

But I digress. 

She made a book about the Mayflower today, and learned some fun facts about how big it was, how many people it held. She was mostly impressed when I whipped out the tape measure and showed her 10 feet, and I said, this ship was 90 times the distance we are from each other right now. She also watched a little feel good video online about the first Thanksgiving. At some point she'll have to learn that we basically infected them with sickness and killed most of them off, among other ugly periods in history. That is not exactly the "brotherhood" sentiment that we like to portray though. So for first grade: Hooray for brotherhood!

This is our free choice read. She is really enjoying this book, as we read it I find myself saying, "oh, no, Kelsey, is that how we are supposed to behave and act?" Oh, that Junie B.! It is a very animated and cute story though. So we like it.

We are working on reading comprehension. We made a flip book about the character, setting, and her favorite part, but I chose not to include that today, but this one instead. This is all about the Junie B. character. Tomorrow we'll do a venn diagram comparing Junie to herself.

I am starting to wonder if Kelsey has a bit of a hearing concern. She cannot seem to differentiate between hearing several sounds and words, so we have some remedial books that I made up for matching and fill ins. She also has a hard time writing things that you say to her, she hears 19 for 90, and 14 for 40. I find I have to really enunciate for her to understand. I also have noticed that she often thinks I say something else in casual conversation and tried to correct me, thinking I said something wrong, but she really heard it wrong. I may revisit our pediatrician about this, but for now I am just going to keep in in my sights.

She also tends to know what she is trying to write, yet the wrong thing comes out, and she realizes immediately, but this was some extra practice.

Consonant digraphs

Anyway, as you can see we are trucking along. Tomorrow we will go to my other daughter's preschool to celebrate Thanksgiving at their preschool feast. Then a light schedule of home-school work. 

I am also hoping to find out more about Power Hours offered at her school, and the meet-up playgroup, but I am not sure if I may be biting off more than I can chew....

Now to make dinner.